Jeffrey D. Sadow is an associate professor of political science at Louisiana State University Shreveport. If you're an elected official, political operative or anyone else upset at his views, don't go bothering LSUS or LSU System officials about that because these are his own views solely.
This publishes Sunday through Thursday with the exception of 7 holidays. Also check out his Louisiana Legislature Log especially during legislative sessions (in "Louisiana Politics Blog Roll" below).

Ackal has come under indictment for some serious
charges, so if convicted would have a felony rap that constitutionally would
bar him from holding office. However, some Iberians have decided they want
him out regardless and have started a recall petition against him. Louisiana’s
recall provision applies to all elected officials except judges of courts
of record (they have a separate judiciary-run mechanism to deal with their disciplining),
any official within six months of finishing a term, or one who has faced a
failed recall within 18 months. An effort does not rely on any special reason
and requires valid signatures of a third of jurisdiction’s registered voters
within 180 days of filing a petition for recall (unless the jurisdiction has
fewer than 1,000 such voters, when two-fifths are required and the deadline is
90 days).

Compared
to other states, only 28 others grant citizens such control over their officials.
Of these, some (10) restrict efforts to certain causes and some (17) limit
applicability only to certain officials. Six include appointed officials, with
four including any official at any level of government.

But Louisiana acts as a real outlier with its
thresholds. The only state that comes close to the one-third level is Tennessee,
which requires two-thirds of voters in the last election (only some local
offices) to sign. No other state comes close for anything higher than the
lowest local offices; many set it at one-quarter and some quite a bit lower;
Oregon, the
first state to institute the idea, which allows the recall of any official
elected or appointed, asks only that a number half of who voted in the previous
election for governor in that jurisdiction to sign, meaning less than 10
percent in many cases.

For this reason, recalls don’t often succeed in
Louisiana and almost never with offices beyond the most lowly and/or larger
jurisdictions. Only slightly
over 100 scheduled elections that have occured in the past half-century,
even as about two-thirds of the few that get to that point ended with a recall
or resignation of the official. Not a single one involved a state official and
almost all involved municipalities. Just three occurred in a jurisdiction of at
least 10,000 or more, none having to gather as many as five figures worth of
signatures to succeed.

This historical record gives little hope for Ackal’s
petitioners. They will need around 16,000 valid signatories. Worse, it shows
how much the threshold discourages even attempts to recall, much less
successful ballot placements, as other states with lower thresholds typically
see the occasional legislator or even executive official including governor
face an election.

Two things then stand out as far as desirable alteration
to Louisiana’s process. First, it should include all public officials, thus
including judges and appointees (which would necessitate a change in
determining the threshold to something like Oregon’s). There’s no real reason to
exclude judges; they already face public votes to enter office, so you can’t
justify leaving it up to the Judiciary
Commission and Supreme Court to boot them off the bench as a means to
insulate from public pressure since their elections already moots that. And why
exclude appointees of elected officials; removal of them may end up a more
parsimonious solution than going after the appointing official as an indirect
tactic when the elected one otherwise might carry out duties adequately.

Secondly and far more importantly, the non-small threshold
must drop, at a bare minimum to 25 percent. This by votes cast was Oregon’s
prior standard (so more like 15 percent total), and in a seven-year
period a few years prior to the change to the current standard, 78 were
held across the state, all but one succeeding. Oregon hasn’t fallen into
anarchy even with the lower standard, so clearly the system works. Further, the
10 percent of registered voters standard in California hasn’t created an
onslaught of attempts at the statewide level; only 161 have been attempted since
its institution in 1913, with just nine making it to the ballot where five
succeeded.

Statute lays out recall standards, and with state
legislators subject to these we can expect feet of clay from them when it comes
to making themselves potentially more vulnerable to recalls by lowering the
threshold. But citizens deserve to have more accountability over public
servants because of the improved governance it creates, so state lawmakers need
to do the right thing and make the change next session.

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